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MLMs are the mirror-world version of community organizing by Cory Doctorow made some interesting points about how many conservative and conspiratorial beliefs mirror progressive and accurate ones.
But I think it uses too much of a dichotomy of progressive vs conservative, when I've seen so many people who sincerely pursue the "good" version of each attitude also fall into the "mirror" version.
Like anti-vaxxing as the mirror of legitimate concerns about the pharmaceutical industry: yes, it's embraced and championed by many conservatives, but it's also massively rife amongst progressives who do legitimately recognise the real issues and push against them as well, that legitimate push-back is just all tangled up with pseudoscience woo.
My grandparents were legitimate socialist activists, involved in protests, union organising , even anti-racist organising, they were about as Progressive(TM) as as you could ask for from that generation... and while Grandma being Jewish protected them from falling into the kind of "rich people suck, Jews have all the money, therefore Jews suck" anti-semitism that plagues the left, they instead fell into equivalent prejudices towards Chinese people.
Sure, TERF rhetoric has been coopted by general bigots who hate women of all types, but it initially started amongst real feminists who mostly recognised the real problems facing women, it just got tangled up with their transphobia and overly simplistic ideas of "penis = amab = man = the bad guy" etc.
Yes, there's some hope for redirecting conservative people who are motivated by legitimate concerns to apply that energy towards the actual solutions... but this will not necessarily stop them from continuing to have some bigoted and conspiratorial attitudes. Even people who have always identified as progressive and would be horrified to be seen as having anything in common with conservatives are not immune.
And this false dichotomy of conspiratorial bigoted conservatives versus clear-eyed rational decent progressives makes it incredibly difficult to address these prejudices when they occur, because the response is "Are you saying I'm conservative? I can prove my leftist credentials! I am clearly not one of them!!" Or people decide they just need to Root Out The Secret Conservatives Who Are Insufficiently Enlightened which turns into circular firing squad because noone is entirely enlightened.
Like the linked post Naomi Klein's "Doppelganger", which argues that the reason Naomi Woolf turned conservative and Naomi Klein didn't is that Klein was a leftist who cared enough about class solidarity while Woolf was merely a liberal. When like... have you met marxists? Especially white straight cis male ones? There is no level of racism/sexism/homophobia etc they cannot sink to and justify as Advancing The Cause Of the Working Class. Meanwhile the vast majority of liberal feminists just... remain liberal feminists, and do not join the far right.
There is no us vs them here. Yeah, conservatives are overall much worse, and there are serious issues with small-l-liberal approaches to politics. But literally everyone has the potential to fall into these cognitive traps. The more immune you think you are, the higher the danger. And framing the similarities in motives between people across the political spectrum as Conservatives Kind Of Have a Point feels awfully close to feeling more interest in finding common ground with bigots than stopping to look at your own tendencies to their same flaws. Yes, we should have clear-eyed compassion towards people who have reasonable motives but take a wrong turn rather than dismissing them as motivated by Evil... but that also includes taking a clear eyed look at ourselves. Because everyone does this to some degree.
He didn't address disability at all but HOO BOY can leftists be TERRIBLE about that omg.
Running out of steam here but I feel like there's also a connection to the way ideas like cancel culture, SJW, woke, political correctness etc all started as in-group leftist or marginalised terms and got co-opted by the right. Anti-vax and TERF weren't initially right-wing either, the right just co-opted and amplified them as convenient rhetoric to justify their existing transphobia, eugenics etc. Conservatism in general often stems from natural and fairly universal human tendencies like nostalgia, mistrust of the Other, a desire to punish Evil etc, all of which come from understandable places and can even be appropriate, but which can also make all of us stumble into unfortunate actions and attitudes.
MLMs don't quite fit this pattern, but... there's plenty of examples of scams/cults etc formed within leftist and marginalised communities which take advantage of and openly 'celebrate' positive community organising. Someone can be a union organiser and lead an abusive power structure. I mean look at like... the communist parties in places like Russia and China, or the Terror in revolutionary France. Horseshoe theory is bunk but really there is no neat safe line between good revolutionary fervour and bad. EVERY SOCIAL AND POWER STRUCTURE CAN TURN TOXIC AND ABUSIVE. Very much including unions and other leftist institutions. Preventing that toxicity and abuse is an unending and difficult but necessary task. You shouldn't throw your hands in the air and decide all activism is bad or that all power structures are equivalently bad etc, but you also can't act like there's an end point where people become Good and Safe and the work is over.
OK BRAIN DONE. There's probably some holes in my logic here I just rambled off the top of my head until my brain fell over.
EDIT: Half formed extra thought: bigotry is correlated with but not unique to conservatism. Being an asshole is politically neutral.
But I think it uses too much of a dichotomy of progressive vs conservative, when I've seen so many people who sincerely pursue the "good" version of each attitude also fall into the "mirror" version.
Like anti-vaxxing as the mirror of legitimate concerns about the pharmaceutical industry: yes, it's embraced and championed by many conservatives, but it's also massively rife amongst progressives who do legitimately recognise the real issues and push against them as well, that legitimate push-back is just all tangled up with pseudoscience woo.
My grandparents were legitimate socialist activists, involved in protests, union organising , even anti-racist organising, they were about as Progressive(TM) as as you could ask for from that generation... and while Grandma being Jewish protected them from falling into the kind of "rich people suck, Jews have all the money, therefore Jews suck" anti-semitism that plagues the left, they instead fell into equivalent prejudices towards Chinese people.
Sure, TERF rhetoric has been coopted by general bigots who hate women of all types, but it initially started amongst real feminists who mostly recognised the real problems facing women, it just got tangled up with their transphobia and overly simplistic ideas of "penis = amab = man = the bad guy" etc.
Yes, there's some hope for redirecting conservative people who are motivated by legitimate concerns to apply that energy towards the actual solutions... but this will not necessarily stop them from continuing to have some bigoted and conspiratorial attitudes. Even people who have always identified as progressive and would be horrified to be seen as having anything in common with conservatives are not immune.
And this false dichotomy of conspiratorial bigoted conservatives versus clear-eyed rational decent progressives makes it incredibly difficult to address these prejudices when they occur, because the response is "Are you saying I'm conservative? I can prove my leftist credentials! I am clearly not one of them!!" Or people decide they just need to Root Out The Secret Conservatives Who Are Insufficiently Enlightened which turns into circular firing squad because noone is entirely enlightened.
Like the linked post Naomi Klein's "Doppelganger", which argues that the reason Naomi Woolf turned conservative and Naomi Klein didn't is that Klein was a leftist who cared enough about class solidarity while Woolf was merely a liberal. When like... have you met marxists? Especially white straight cis male ones? There is no level of racism/sexism/homophobia etc they cannot sink to and justify as Advancing The Cause Of the Working Class. Meanwhile the vast majority of liberal feminists just... remain liberal feminists, and do not join the far right.
There is no us vs them here. Yeah, conservatives are overall much worse, and there are serious issues with small-l-liberal approaches to politics. But literally everyone has the potential to fall into these cognitive traps. The more immune you think you are, the higher the danger. And framing the similarities in motives between people across the political spectrum as Conservatives Kind Of Have a Point feels awfully close to feeling more interest in finding common ground with bigots than stopping to look at your own tendencies to their same flaws. Yes, we should have clear-eyed compassion towards people who have reasonable motives but take a wrong turn rather than dismissing them as motivated by Evil... but that also includes taking a clear eyed look at ourselves. Because everyone does this to some degree.
He didn't address disability at all but HOO BOY can leftists be TERRIBLE about that omg.
Running out of steam here but I feel like there's also a connection to the way ideas like cancel culture, SJW, woke, political correctness etc all started as in-group leftist or marginalised terms and got co-opted by the right. Anti-vax and TERF weren't initially right-wing either, the right just co-opted and amplified them as convenient rhetoric to justify their existing transphobia, eugenics etc. Conservatism in general often stems from natural and fairly universal human tendencies like nostalgia, mistrust of the Other, a desire to punish Evil etc, all of which come from understandable places and can even be appropriate, but which can also make all of us stumble into unfortunate actions and attitudes.
MLMs don't quite fit this pattern, but... there's plenty of examples of scams/cults etc formed within leftist and marginalised communities which take advantage of and openly 'celebrate' positive community organising. Someone can be a union organiser and lead an abusive power structure. I mean look at like... the communist parties in places like Russia and China, or the Terror in revolutionary France. Horseshoe theory is bunk but really there is no neat safe line between good revolutionary fervour and bad. EVERY SOCIAL AND POWER STRUCTURE CAN TURN TOXIC AND ABUSIVE. Very much including unions and other leftist institutions. Preventing that toxicity and abuse is an unending and difficult but necessary task. You shouldn't throw your hands in the air and decide all activism is bad or that all power structures are equivalently bad etc, but you also can't act like there's an end point where people become Good and Safe and the work is over.
OK BRAIN DONE. There's probably some holes in my logic here I just rambled off the top of my head until my brain fell over.
EDIT: Half formed extra thought: bigotry is correlated with but not unique to conservatism. Being an asshole is politically neutral.